Autoliv Unveils Foldable, Retractable Steering Wheel for Absolutely Autonomous Automobiles

Autoliv and Tensor unveiled an revolutionary new steering wheel that folds utterly into the dashboard, which they demonstrated at CES 2026. This innovation addresses one of the urgent sensible points with high-level autonomous automobiles: put the automobile in Degree 4 mode, the place it does the entire driving for you however solely below sure circumstances and with out human intervention, and the wheel merely vanishes, giving passengers extra knee room to stretch their legs or do some work.

The system has a twin mode design, which lets you yank the wheel again below human management at any time and it’ll function usually. Once you permit the automobile to take management, the wheel effortlessly folds away once more, utterly clean. That’s not all; a middle console display will slide over to fill the area earlier than neatly folding away while you take the wheel again, permitting you to renew driving.

We will’t neglect about security, both; in guide mode, the wheel has an airbag to assist shield you within the unusual occasion that it’s a must to cease unexpectedly. When the wheel is parked, a particular passenger airbag positioned within the instrument panel deploys. Each settings present the identical stage of safety, indicating that the system is clever sufficient to vary and adapt to the state of affairs at hand, reasonably than relying on a one-size-fits-all resolution.

Fabien Dumont, Autoliv’s high tech honcho, says that security within the automotive world must change into far more subtle, and that this challenge demonstrates how {hardware} can change as much as match the best way the automobile is working at any given time, leading to higher consolation with out sacrificing any of the security all of us require. Because of this, this foldaway steering wheel ought to meet all of Autoliv’s security standards, which have been established excessive for many years.

In the meantime, Tensor CEO Jay Xiao believes that this flexibility might be actually helpful to a few of us. Many individuals cherish the pliability of letting a automobile take over after they select, however you received’t all the time wish to let go of the wheel. This wheel lets you accomplish it, and we’ll see it in full manufacturing with the Tensor Robocar, a private electrical autonomous automobile. The corporate is speaking about beginning manufacturing within the second a part of this 12 months and rolling it throughout america, the European Union, and the Center East.
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